clout

The list is long and sad and full of skies and blues, the tension between the stretch of light and the reach of shadow, simple repetitions and well placed cravings. The depth of heavens and the thick of the atmosphere, the day while the world crunches the numbers and grinds its gears. Deep breaths and the press of devout flesh, the fireworks busting out in the drawling afternoon, always explosion time somewhere. Flies touch the perspiring skin, flitting from hand to forehead, a canonical expression of some dug down dream or deft symbol. The trees stir suddenly. The wind does what it wants. 

It’s the mowers and the blowers, and the traffic past in scads and huddles, the scintillating green and oasis blue. The fever on fairy wings, bitter magic on the tongue. The stairs and ladders the words reveal, the hidden doors and magic portals, enchanted mirrors and rabbit holes. The whetted lips, the stropped syllables, the glistening of fricatives and sharp teeth somewhere behind the sentence. Clothes hang like thumped drunks, limp and damp in the sodden evening, shoulders half clothesline, half gallows as they shrug like shining horizon. Stuck to the world, stricken from the ledger. The words fall where they will.

Maybe it’s the prize of consolation, maybe it is the haunted house of the heart. Maybe it is tender to the east, maybe it is the timbre of the west, or just the way that dress swayed and clung as you walked away. A box of letters in the chamber of days and dust. A ruthless pin through being and board, the spat out incantations and indifferent curses. Time a low light, life a tall shadow running from the dusk. The skin adorned with scars and scratches, decorated with bite and blemish, slowly losing lucidity as it returns to the dust. The sun gives up on all of us yet again. The wishes scatter up towards the stars.